Sarah wrote:

In WinXP Sp2 I've tried setting the Base Priority for SETI to Normal. The result that I'm expecting is faster crunching times. Everytime I restart the Base Priority defaults to Low. boincmgr remains at Normal. Is there any way to set it permanently to Normal or any other priority that I want to?

No, that's not supported by the client(s) (yet).

I'm sure its been requested before, but it is a very low priority feature to code up compared to the other work being done at present.

(OK, bad pun on the priorities :-O )

Each time the client starts a new WU, then that process is started at the usual low priority. If you have no other tasks running, then this is not a problem. s@h is /intended/ not to slow normal working. If there is no other work, then increasing the priority for Boinc will have little effect because there is no more CPU time available other than the 100% already being used by Boinc.


However, if you have other background tasks running, then you can juggle the CPU share by tweaking the priorities. My workaround is to have an automatic cron job (on linux) run every 15 mins to check and set the priority for any boinc processes. So a boinc job starts at "nice 19" and then gets set higher when the cron check catches it. The linux OS scheduler keeps everything nicely responsive ;-)


Note that on Windows, certain _critical_ tasks run at low priority! So increasing the priority on Boinc can cause your machine to slow to a very sluggish very slow crawl!!!

In short, (especially so on Windows,) you don't gain much by increasing the Boinc priority.

Good luck,
Martin